You’d pay your journalists (”for money”)? So much for the low costs you claimed. Unless you won’t pay them enough to live on, in which case you’ll be in the same territory as Torontoist and blogTO (I don’t know whether they pay their contributors or not, but if they do I doubt that it’s very much).

As for “real reporting by real journalists”, I know of one Torontoist contributor who also writes for the National Post. I see no loss of quality there.

I do realize that you’re talking about much wider local coverage than Torontoist and blogTO have, but there’s no reason why they can’t just expand their coverage. They won’t do it now because the Toronto Star and other local established media companies make their stories available for free online, but if the Star etc. all stopped publishing, they could step up to fill the void. As might you and others. You have no natural advantage: yes, there are lots of journalists on the market right now, but there’s no particular reason for them to prefer your company over another.

@Bill Reporters have biases like anyone else and I would encourage them to expose them as much as possible. I would not try to rein that in or control that.

Then again, I don’t presume I would have any kind of lead editorial role in this project. If there are not people more capable than myself to take on that role, we won’t get off the ground.

A few months back I wrote a post titled, “Why are print newspapers dying?” As with most of my posts, it has a lot more questions than answers, but in it I wrote, “… I would argue that one of the things that has changed is who calls the shots in determining what is news. The editorial aspect of “news” is vanishing. Users are their own editors, particularly with aggregator tools like Google Reader that allow a user to, in a manner of speaking, design his or her own newspaper in terms of content and, to a limited degree, even the look of it.”

A worrying part of the Internet’s multiple ways to communicate, and reflective of contemporary politics, is a tendency to talk amongst ourselves – preach to the choir, so to speak. We choose to hear the voices and topics we like, and ignore the others or dismiss them as irrelevant.

So, being locally focused will be important but won’t be enough. Will you be left? Right? Focused on the environment? Business? What the character of the new media company is will be hugely important as far as getting an audience. Equally important will be what it is not. Local won’t be enough. (I suppose this is what would traditionally be called editorial position but, if so, it’s position on steroids.)

There are political junkies out there and there are people who couldn’t care less about politics. There are people who take to technology news like crack, and there are others indifferent to it. Culture is big for some, for others not at all. How narrow a niche will a media company need to be to develop an audience large enough to make it successful?

And how do you deliver news in a world that is less interested in objective reporting than in having their established opinions echoed back to them?

Speaking of which, here in Toronto we already have the popular Torontoist and blogTO. How would your new venture differ?